Main Content

Category Archives: Statement

ASAN condemns the Trump Administration’s new “Religious Refusals of Care Rule”, which allows hospitals and medical providers to refuse people care based on their religious or moral convictions. This type of policy is a threat to disability rights. The disability community has continually struggled to get the health care...

This statement is available as a PDF here. Today, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued guidance that reaffirms its commitment to implementing the Home and Community Based Settings (HCBS) Rule, including important requirements around the “heightened scrutiny” process for settings that have institutional qualities. First issued...

As people with disabilities and loved ones of people with disabilities, as disability rights advocates, and as human beings, we are horrified by the deliberate neglect which led to the deaths of eleven children last fall at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, an institution for medically fragile...

The House has voted to pass HR 1112, a bill that would close the “Charleston Loophole”, which currently enables some people who have failed criminal background checks to purchase guns. While we would like to applaud this effort to enforce existing common-sense gun laws, an unrelated amendment introduced by...

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is considering adopting a federal standard which would exclude transgender and intersex people from the protections of many anti-discrimination laws and policies. There is a significant overlap between the autistic and transgender communities – and since autistic people first...

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network strongly condemns the Administration’s proposed “Public Charge” regulation, which discriminates against disabled and low-income immigrants and makes pathways to American citizenship contingent upon wealth and the absence of disability. “Public charge” clauses have existed in US immigration law since 1882 and are a clear...

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network opposes the final position statements from the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) regarding Facilitated Communication (FC) and Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). These statements take a broad position, based on incomplete and absent evidence, that all communications by users of RPM and FC should...

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network opposes the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. As a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Kavanaugh has opposed the rights of people with disabilities to make our own choices. He has said that he might want to strike...

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network forcefully condemns the Trump Administration’s unconscionable policy of separating immigrant families at the border, and the subsequent incarceration and warehousing of infants and children. This policy is not mandated by law, but is a deliberate act of cruelty the Administration has chosen to inflict...

Today, the Centers for Disease Control released the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network report, which estimates the prevalence of autism in certain areas. The results indicate that better recognition of autism, and an encouraging reduction of racial and gender disparities in diagnosis, have caused rates of diagnosis...